Displaying 1 - 10 of 14
Abstract
When concerns about child safety and wellbeing are substantiated, decisions are made in the context of the options available—child(ren) remaining supported within family, short‐term removal with a plan for return home when parental issues are addressed, or permanent care placement. In New Zealand, families facing possible removal experience multiple challenges including poverty, family violence, parental mental health and substance abuse issues and historical and inter‐generational trauma. Lack of resources to facilitate the intensive intervention needed to address such complexity…
Abstract
Aims
With increasing access to integrated administrative data, and advances in predictive analytics, it is both theoretically possible and practically feasible to use predictive risk models (PRMs) to automatically risk stratify entire birth-cohorts as to their risk of experiencing multiple adversities in childhood (Vaithianathan et al., 2013, 2018; Rouland & Vaithianathan, 2018). Such automated screening tools allow agencies to identify families at highest risk and offer them preventive services in a timely fashion. However, little is known about what protective factors…
Abstract
In families where child abuse and neglect have already occurred, there is a strong imperative to provide interventions that reduce or eliminate harm done to children. Parenting programs lack tailoring for the needs of maltreating parents, and maltreating parents themselves are a heterogeneous group with varying needs. The literature on the effectiveness of parenting interventions for high-risk parents is limited, and this scarcity of knowledge can result in child protection cases being treated as a natural experiment. For children who experience ongoing maltreatment by their…
Abstract
Preventing child abuse is a unifying goal. Making decisions that affect the lives of children is an unenviable task assigned to social services in countries around the world. The consequences of incorrectly labelling children as being at risk of abuse or missing signs that children are unsafe are well-documented. Evidence-based decision-making tools are increasingly common in social services provision but few, if any, have used social network data. We analyse a child protection services dataset that includes a network of…
INTRODUCTION
Decisions in the child protection context take place in a complex environment influenced by individual decision-makers, institutional resources and practices, demographic inequalities, and family responses. While some variation in decision outcomes are inevitable and desirable in order to respond to unique family and whānau contexts, the principles, logics and resources informing such decisions should be consistent. Where they differ too much, families in similar situations receive different responses, contributing to inequities and inconsistencies in decision outcomes. Both…
Abstract
Recent policy reforms have substantially changed state responses to child abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ). These reforms draw on two related discourses: vulnerability and social investment. Shaped by a neoliberal political context, these discourses influence constructions of children and parents. Children are constituted in individualistic ways; as vulnerable victims requiring intervention to optimise future functioning, dichotomised against their irresponsible and invulnerable parents. This has different consequences for children in and outside of the permanent foster…
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To determine if children identified by a predictive risk model as at “high risk” of maltreatment are also at elevated risk of injury and mortality in early childhood.
METHODS: We built a model that predicted a child’s risk of a substantiated finding of maltreatment by child protective services for children born in New Zealand in 2010. We assigned risk scores to the 2011 birth cohort, and flagged children as “very high risk” if they were in the top 10% of the score distribution for maltreatment. We also set a less…
This article is part of a special edition of the journal Psychosocial Intervention (Volume 22 No.03 December 2013) focused on the state of child protection in a wide variety of countries with special attention to out-of-home care placements, principally family foster care and residential care, tough several aspects related to adoption were included as well.
This article provides an outline of the early development of care and protection in Australia and New Zealand as a…
This study conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of scientific literature to summarize the evidence for associations between individual types of non-sexual child maltreatment and outcomes related to mental and physical health. This review is a first of its kind to demonstrate in aggregate quantitative effects the knowledge behind the associations, using 124 studies mostly from Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Eighty percent of child maltreatment is perpetrated by parents or parental guardians, and poverty,…
"New Zealand’s Catholic Church formally apologised on Friday to the survivors of abuse within the church and said its systems and culture must change," says this article from Reuters. According to the article, "an interim report by the Commission in December found up to a quarter of a million children, young people and vulnerable adults were physically and sexually abused in New Zealand’s faith-based and state care institutions from the 1960s to early 2000s."